Social Security policymaking: An examination of select policies in the U. S. Social Security system

This dissertation examines three distinct although related issues in the policy history of the U.S. Social Security system.;I examine the thesis that when agricultural and domestic employments were excluded from coverage in the 1935 Social Security Act, this was an act of racial bias against African-Americans. I show that this thesis is both conceptually flawed and disproven by the available empirical evidence.;I examine the thesis that the Social Security program has contained or does contain gender biases against women. I show that indeed there have been numerous gendered policies in Social Security. However, contrary to the claims and assumptions of the standard thesis, these gendered policies have overwhelmingly benefited women and disadvantaged men.;I examine the period between the major legislation of the 1939 Social Security Amendments and the important amendments of 1950. In the standard view, this period has generally been characterized as a time of quiescence in policymaking. About the only policy activity between these two milestones was a series of "freezes" in taxing policy whereby scheduled tax rate increases were not permitted to take effect. Most scholars have ignored these freezes, believing them of little significance. I argue that these rate freezes were an important reversal in existing Social Security policy. I also undertake a systematic effort to assess the impact of these policies on the financing of the program. I find that for a decade or more during these years the Social Security system was almost certainly insolvent in the long-run.;The dissertation opens with a short general discussion of policy history as a discipline and the basic conceptual and theoretical context for the type of policy history pursued in this research. I then turn to a brief introduction to the Social Security program, to frame the necessary context for the more detailed work to follow. These two opening sections are followed by the three major parts of the dissertation, in which I examine each of the three indicated theses in detail.